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Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Stealing medicines

This article on the Counter Punch website by Fran Quigley, a professor at Indiana
University McKinney School of Law, where he directs the Health and Human Rights
Clinic is worth extensively quoting from:

“Along the path toward the creation of a global capitalist
system, some of the most significant steps were taken by the English enclosure
movement.

Between the 15th to 19th centuries, the rich and the
powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private
property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and
small farmers were relegated to wage laborers. In Das Kapital, Marx described
the process by coining the term land-grabbing. To British historian E.P.
Thompson, it was “a plain enough case of class robbery.”

More recently, a similar enclosure movement has taken place.
This time, the fenced-off commodity is life-saving medicine. Playing the role
of modern-day lords of the manor are pharmaceutical corporations, which have
taken a good that was once considered off-limits for private profiteering and
turned it into an expensive commodity. Instead of displacing small landholders,
this enclosure movement causes suffering and death: Billions of people across
the globe go without essential medicines, and 10 million die each year as a
result.

Many people curse the for-profit medicine industry. But few
know that the enclosure erected around affordable medicines is both relatively
new and artificially imposed. For nearly all of human history, attempting to
corner the markets on affordable medicines has been considered both immoral and
illegal.

It’s time now to reclaim this commons, and reestablish
medicines as a public good…

….As the English enclosure movement proved, exclusivity can
be artificially created by literally or figuratively walling off common access.
Exclusivity can be undone as well: The modern open-source software movement
takes a good that some have tried to make exclusive — software code — and
freely shares it, leading to a plethora of creative developments….

….“Letters patent,” meaning open letters, were issued in
14th century England to induce foreign craftsmen to relocate there. Attempts to
coordinate global intellectual property rules led to the 1883 Paris Convention
and the 1886 Berne Convention, and eventually to the creation of the United
Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization in 1967. But nations who
signed on to those agreements retained the ability to determine the length of
patents and what products would be covered. For many nations, that flexibility
meant excluding medicines from patent protection. For example, Germany’s patent
law of 1877 labeled medicines as “essential goods,” along with food and
chemicals, and prohibited any attempts to patent them.

In the middle of the 20th century, several post-colonial
nations adopted similar laws. India’s patent law extended only to the processes
for creating medicines, not the drugs themselves. The law opened the door for
Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers to reverse-engineer patented drugs and then
devise different, cheaper production methods. India soon became known as “the
pharmacy of the developing world.” Brazil, Mexico, and other Central and South
American countries also adopted limits on the patentability of medicines.

European countries like Italy and Sweden didn’t grant
pharmaceutical patents until the 1970s, and Spain refused to do so until 1992.
Even when medicine patents were given, many nations granted liberal access to
compulsory licenses for patented drugs, meaning that generic manufacturers were
free to make the drugs and pay a royalty to the patent holders. During the
period between 1962 and 1992, Canada granted 613 licenses to import or
manufacture pharmaceutical products….

….The enclosed medicine system inflicts additional damage
beyond the artificially inflated cost of patented medicines. The resources of
for-profit corporations are inevitably concentrated on the development and
promotion of medicines that can be sold at a high mark-up to wealthy consumers.
“Lifestyle” drugs that address male pattern baldness or sexual performance are
exhaustively researched and marketed, yet the past half-century has seen just
one drug developed to treat tuberculosis, which kills more than a million
people each year. A landmark study published by the British medical journal The
Lancet showed that of the 1,556 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and
2004, only 21 were for tropical diseases….Remarkably, a full 70 percent of the
medicine brought to market by the industry in the past 20 years provided no therapeutic
benefit over the products already available. Instead, these “me too” drugs were
put forward in order to grab a share of an existing lucrative market.